Mercenaries mode: too grindy to be enjoyed

[Zee-1116]

@SparkyElf-2852

No, I seem unimpressed by pretentious forum posts whose authors appear to exhibit a celf-centred worldview in conjuction with a shallow, emotion-based surrogate of an analysis with a supposedly moralising and definitive verdict.

Oh, the irony!

@SparkyElf-2852

like this

The best comment from this ^ link that you provided is:

@Toker420-1763

It’s a very grindy mode with no depth or creativity. An uninspired version of Rock-Paper-Scissors with a punishing reward system. They even managed to botch the PvP system within it. This should have been an easy no-brainer mode to build upon, but they haven’t. They just continue to add new cards and expect people to keep handing them money for nothing.

@SparkyElf-2852

Yeah, I’ve seen a small army, as reiterated a few times already, of this kind of posters. What you all probably don’t realise is that your posts, so similar both in form and content, generally look like this: ‘I once dated a boy/girl from X, even spent 20 coins on a lunch together, however, later he/she dumped me (we broke up). I am so frustrated and disappointed, thus it is clear that boys/girl from X are trash, and I cannot possibly undestand why would someone even come close a boy/girl from X’. About the latter part especially — I could nearly litreally link a handful of examples written according to this pattern, but don’t really feel like it now.

In response to this ^ pontification, I am simply going to quote you:

@SparkyElf-2852

Hate to break it for you, but these are your personal problems, really.

@SparkyElf-2852

it’s quite clear that Mercenaries is mostly about PvE, at least in terms of popularity, which seems to have been the idea in the first place.

The Mercenaries mode is completely designed to force players to do a tremendous amount of PvE grinding in order to obtain competitive PvP comps.

The PvE to PVP play ratio is the most obvious part of Mercenaries’ design. You cannot simply look at a graph of data comparing the hours spent playing PvE vs. hours spent playing PvP in order to determine that PvE is the more popular and fun aspect of the mode, since there is no way to avoid PvE while developing mercenaries for PvP. The more important point is that both the PvE and PvP aspects of Mercenaries is quite bad and unfulfilling.

But hey, thanks for once again with helping to confirm the truth of one of mine and the OP’s points—and the most common complaint about Mercenaries:

@Zee-1116

2). Mercenaries is way way way too grindy

@Nihiliste-21892

I played +/- 50 hours of it only to see how ABSOLUTELY INSANE the grind to get every character & max them to abilities level 5 is : a legendary character costs 500 coins. Speedrunning an hour of the same raid with Ragnaros (as seen by Old Guardian on YT) gives 500 coins across 3 characters.

There are 116 mercenaries as of today.

Reaching level 30 FOR TWO CHARACTERS takes 50 hours through the training grounds. Characters are barely able at level 30 unupgraded to clear heroic dungeons.

To sum up : unless you pay, you’ll NEVER enjoy pvp or high level dungeons. Except if you are ready to sacrifice THOUSANDS of hours prior to having the whole content unlocked

@SparkyElf-2852

[2] https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/7685520/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBWfYYBcYz0

Thanks for sharing the graph and Old Guardians’ comments, which reveals how big of a dumpster mode and a failure that Mercenaries is. Mercenaries is the least played and popular mode in Hearthstone—it’s even less popular than Duels, and that says a lot.

To quote Old Guardian on the topic of Mercenaries’ popularity and success: “It’s a pretty grim tale for Mercenaries, I have to admit…Mercenaries is not exactly thriving.”

Well, how about this ^, his words echoes my own sentiments about Mercenaries from 2021.